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Coin flipping, coin tossing, or heads or tails is the practice of throwing a coin in the air and checking which side is showing when it lands, in order to randomly choose between two alternatives. It is a form of sortition which inherently has two possible outcomes.
Until the advent of computer simulations, Kerrich's study, published in 1946, was widely cited as evidence of the asymptotic nature of probability. It is still regarded as a classic study in empirical mathematics. 2,000 of their fair coin flip results are given by the following table, with 1 representing heads and 0 representing tails.
In some games, coins are placed tails (white cross) up. In casino games the coins are placed with opposing (one head, one tail) sides up. Toss the Kip The Spinner hands the kip back to the Ringkeeper before a possibly losing throw, i.e. to retire after a winning throw. Heads Both coins land with the "head" side facing up.
A fair coin, when tossed, should have an equal chance of landing either side up. In probability theory and statistics, a sequence of independent Bernoulli trials with probability 1/2 of success on each trial is metaphorically called a fair coin. One for which the probability is not 1/2 is called a biased or unfair coin.
The first time heads appears, the game ends and the player wins whatever is the current stake. Thus the player wins 2 dollars if heads appears on the first toss, 4 dollars if tails appears on the first toss and heads on the second, 8 dollars if tails appears on the first two tosses and heads on the third, and so on.
Coin flipping can be defined for biased coins as well, i.e. the bits are not equally likely. The notion of correctness has also been formalized which requires that when both players follow the protocol (nobody cheats) the players always agree on the bit generated and that the bit follows some fixed probability distribution.
Heads or Tails, or Testa o croce, or Heads I Win, Tails You Lose, an Italian comedy film; Heads or Tails, or Pismo - Glava, a 1983 drama film by Bahrudin Čengić; Heads or Tails, or Pile ou face, a Canadian film; Heads or Tails, or J'en suis!, a Canadian film; Heads or Tails, an American drama
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